A
head for gardening: Albany DGS worker Bernie Fana.
:Photo by Chris Sheilds

The
Secret Life of PlantsAnd the unsung heroes who keep
Albany's public gardens in full bloom B y Darryl McGrath

There is a secret to getting Albany to burst into bloom
every summer, against the odds and in the most unlikely
places. It’s when rubble-strewn soil sloshes over with color,
in the form of roses and marigolds and impatiens.

That secret is water.

Water can make flowers clamber over fences and planter boxes
for a few precious months, despite a painfully short growing
season. It can coax life out of streetscapes that barely
look like they can support the buildings, let alone a patch
of geraniums.

“Water
is the single most important thing,” says Judy Stacey, who
has been the city gardener for five years. “There’s no point
in putting flowers in if they’re not going to be watered.”

But to get water, you need volunteers willing to tend Albany’s
hundreds of public gardens. Stacey and a crew of four year-round
laborers from the city Department of General Services—along
with a staff of seasonal workers—couldn’t begin to keep
up with the effort.

In Stacey’s favorite story of volunteer spirit, she recounts
the time the Delaware Avenue Neighborhood Association bought
wagons and plastic buckets, filled the buckets at their
firehouse and then carted the water to a patch of public
gardens that the city could not get to in time.

Residents like these can be found throughout the city. They
are the tenants and homeowners willing to stretch hoses
across sidewalks and carry heavy watering cans from their
kitchen sinks night after night.

“They’ve
gotten together ahead of time and decided they want to do
something,” Stacey says. “There are community gardens where
people have gardened for years, but a lot of people are
gardening right in front of their house. It says, ‘Somebody
who lives in this house cares.’ ”

Judy Stacey tools around Albany in a Department of General
Services Ford Ranger pickup truck cluttered with rakes and
sprinkler parts, her straw hat with its pink grosgrain band
pitched behind the driver’s seat. As she drives, she recites
statistics.

Albany plants at least 200,000 spring bulbs every year,
and the number may be as high as 250,000.

“I
lose count after about 150,000,” Stacey says. “I put the
last of the tulip bulbs in this year on Christmas Eve.”

She works with nearly 40 volunteer gardening groups, many
connected to neighborhood associations. There is work for
all, because the city has about 450 flower gardens, 750
hanging baskets and 132 varieties of flowers. Washington
Park alone has 80 gardens.

Stacey, 57, is deeply tanned and athletic-looking, with
brown hair hanging in a ponytail halfway down her back.
She is a self-taught gardener who doesn’t have the time
to plant a garden at her Albany home. She works year-round
and earns a base salary of $34,161. In the winter, she and
a staff of four DGS laborers shovel out snowbound elderly
or disabled residents during storms.

She can be seen all over the city in hiking boots and shorts,
stopping to poke the soil or check a new planting. She takes
delight in the fact that someone once called the cops on
her, mistaking her for a vandal desecrating a city flower
bed. To Stacey, that means people care.

“What
we’re finding is the gardening is bringing people out of
their house and talking to their neighbors,” she says. “It
may only start with a few tree wells.”

Stacey
doesn’t like to talk about herself; she likes to talk about
her volunteers. Her volunteers don’t like to talk about
themselves, either; they like to talk about their gardens.
Listening to them, you get the feeling that all of these
people are having a lush, summerlong love affair with flowers.

The volunteers have traditions and rituals that they repeat
year after year. There’s Arbor Hill muralist Yacob Williams,
who has underscored his wall-sized paintings on building
exteriors with scarlet lines of rose bushes while supervising
neighborhood cleanup projects.

There’s Park South resident Glen Snider, 78, who signed
on as a volunteer at the Ten Broeck Mansion garden a dozen
years ago, and is now the head master gardener there. (The
nonprofit mansion is not a city garden, but Stacey considers
it one of the city’s showcases of volunteerism.)

Peter Rumora, 72, has been gardening for 40 years and could
qualify as the dean of Albany gardening volunteers. Rumora
tends the conifer and wildflower gardens in Academy Park,
which faces City Hall and is arguably the quirkiest, most
fascinating of the city’s green spaces. Yes, there really
is a plant called ironweed, and you can see it here: tall
spikes of leaves topped with purple flowers.

Both plots hark back to a beautification movement in the
1980s, when wealthy families became plant patrons. The Harrimans
backed the conifer garden, while contributions by the real-estate
entrepreneur Irving Kirch got the wildflower garden going.

“Putting
out plants is the most economical way to dress the city
up,” says Rumora, who moved from Albany to Schenectady six
years ago but still travels to Academy Park to tend the
gardens. “It’s an incredible bang for your buck.”

It’s not easy to get Albany into bloom every year. The city’s
trademark tulips are actually a major pain in the neck to
produce, because squirrels react to tulip bulbs the way
humans react to gourmet chocolates, and eat them as fast
as they can find them. The thousands of bulbs that bloom
despite the squirrels get dug up at the end of the season
anyway, because they look best when they’re planted fresh
each fall.

“After
our long, gray winter, to have that brilliant, electric
color makes up for all the problems,” Stacey says. “And
once they’re up, they’re trouble-free.”

DGS Commissioner Bill Bruce credits Albany Mayor Jerry Jennings
with expanding the department’s mission into beautification.
To that end, the city will help a neighborhood gardening
project by tilling a vacant lot or dumping a truckload of
soil.

The three-season gardening effort in Albany, which begins
with the tulips and ends with chrysanthemums, costs about
$98,000 in bulbs and plants, which are purchased through
public bid.

“For
a city the size of Albany, with our budget, it’s a substantial
amount, but a good investment,” Bruce says.

Not that anyone is complaining, and Stacey would be ready
for them if they did, armed with passionate arguments about
the benefits of gardening.

“It’s
certainly a small price to pay for the enjoyment it gives
the citizens,” she says of the time and money and love required
to get the city blooming after six months of winter. “If
people are happy here, if they can take pride in it, if
it can take those hard edges of concrete off—they’re going
to contribute back many, many times.”

Garden
of Eatin’Going strong and getting
stronger every day, Capital District Community Gardens provides
better living through gardening for the area’s urban population
By
Kate Sipher

For
many city dwellers, those small gardens nestled between
buildings and within parks are merely oases of green leafy
goodies for the eyes, nose and mind. A welcome respite from
concrete and glass—a five-second breather as we traverse
the city streets. Or perhaps we use them as a spot to rest
and ponder.

These are perfectly legitimate functions, but the roughly
600 area families who participate in the communal plots
can attest that there are even further rewards for those
who garden within—although one can’t completely get away
from the glass.

“A
lot of the soil is urban soil,” says Amy Klein. “You know,
an interesting mix of soil, clay and broken glass.” Klein
is the director of Capital District Community Gardens, the
30-year-old nonprofit service organization that manages
the gardens—spread throughout Albany, Schenectady and Rensselaer
counties, with the vast majority in urban areas.

More than half of the participants are low-income families,
who supplement their family’s diet with food they grow in
their plot, which is paid for on a sliding scale (they’re
called “contributions” rather than “fees,” since you only
pay what you can). In a season, a gardener can grow $1,000
worth of food, and any who are savvy about extending their
growing season and storing their produce will reap further
rewards.

There are 39 gardens under the umbrella of CDCG’s management,
and Klein says the organization is looking to create more—one
hope is that there will be three more by the end of this
summer. “We’re looking for a site in Cohoes, and we’re looking
for a new site in the Mont Pleasant neighborhood of Schenectady—we
don’t have any in that neighborhood,” Klein says. “And another
one in Albany.”

“Albany
could support quite a few more,” Klein admits. Take one
Albany neighborhood near Lincoln Park that has with a cluster
of gardens: Even with the huge 51-plot garden at the bottom
of the park, the Lincoln Park garden, the 3-year-old Chuck
Shoudy Memorial Garden on Martin Luther King Boulevard in
the park (15 plots) and another garden right around the
corner at Irving Street and Myrtle Avenue (18 plots), the
gardens are all filled. “We could definitely use more space
in that area,” says Klein.

The city of Albany actually has 18 community gardens, with
one—unique for the whole region—on the border of Albany
and Delmar: Normanskill Farm garden, which provides more
than 40 plots, called “fields” in this case, that are 1,000
to 2,000 square feet per plot. This is a garden for Albany
residents, and gardeners who want the extra space will travel
outside of their neighborhoods to garden there—an exception,
generally, to the rule that people garden close to home.

“We
try to encourage people to garden as close as possible to
either where they live or where they work,” Klein says,
“because the closer you are to the garden, the more likely
you’re going to come often, and take care of it.” Which
brings us to an important rule of the community gardens:
Take care of your plot.

It’s not a difficult rule, no more difficult than the actual
gardening—which, contrary to many observers, is not an easy
undertaking. Once the season gets rolling, which is supposed
to be by June 1—another rule—CDCG staff patrol the gardens,
making sure everyone is happy, that the shared space looks
good (everyone shares the duties of mowing the pathways,
picking up litter, things that make the whole garden healthy),
and making sure everyone is actually keeping up their plots.

Which sometimes isn’t the case. “Usually life intervenes
and something comes up,” Klein says, discussing why people
drop out of the program. “And when it’s a situation where
there’s an illness or something like that, we obviously
try to help them as much as we can, and get other gardeners
to help them so they can carry through the season.

“And
sometimes people just abandon their plots because it was
harder work than they thought it might be, and they aren’t
up for it,” she continues. These abandoned sites can also
get noticed by the garden coordinator, which many of the
gardens have—an individual who has agreed to keep an eye
on the site, and who is in somewhat constant contact with
the CDCG staff. Coordinators will alert the staff to water
issues, compost and wood-chip issues, and what have you,
as well as let the gardeners know when the free plants and
seeds are available—they’re always available, just at different
times.

Water is a huge issue for a garden, which is no surprise,
but for our area’s gardens it’s not as dire a situation
as it is for other regions. “Last summer we went to a conference
for the American Community Garden Association,” Klein relates,
“and we walked away feeling really positive about the program
we have here in this area.” When a discussion about water
arose, fellow community gardeners were shocked at the ease
of water distribution within the CDCG community. “We provide
all of our gardens with water in one way or another,” relates
Klein. “Most of them have water spigots, and if they don’t
have a water spigot, then we have barrels that the fire
department comes and fills for the gardeners. This is such
an alien concept in other parts of the country. People in
New York City almost fell off their seats in awe that the
fire department would do that and that so many of our gardens
have water spigots.”

Klein and the rest of the CDCG staffers, while constantly
working to manage the gardens, also keep busy in an effort
to increase the public’s awareness of their existence. “When
I came here I used to say this is the best-kept secret imaginable,”
Klein says. “I thought I knew a lot about what was going
on in this area in the environmental field, and I didn’t
know anything about this organization.”

CDGC has come out of the closet during Klein’s six years
with the organization, and the program just keeps getting
stronger, with increasing garden sites, maintenance and
repairs a regular occurrence, a new and very large office
space that can now house more staff, volunteers and interns,
an educational program on the near horizon and one a little
further out.

The group’s imminent educational agenda includes the new
position of garden educator, a staffer who can work one-on-one
with novice gardeners. “To get more low-income people to
really use the gardens so they can provide food for their
family,” Klein says.

“Gardening
is hard work,” she continues. “So many people think it’s
such a nice little pursuit, but it’s really much more than
that.”

The long-term educational program stirring in the minds
of Klein and the other CDCG staff members involves a gardening-education
center on a two-acre plot adjoining one of their Troy gardens
(it’s actually on the site of their old offices). “Right
now, we’re in the imagining stage—the beginning planning
stages,” says Klein. They’re imagining a classroom and greenhouse
facility as well as an outdoor classroom for demonstration
purposes. “We can teach composting techniques; we can teach
rooftop gardening; different types of gardening techniques;
extending the growing season,” explains Klein. “All kinds
of wonderful hands-on techniques that you just can’t do
in a classroom setting effectively.”

And CDCG will continue to maintain and create garden plots
throughout the region, and many people will continue to
grow a large amount of their family’s food. And perhaps
fewer of us will merely pause outside the gate to gaze at
the luxuriant vista. Perhaps more of us, especially with
the promised training on the way, will enter the garden.